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Espionage on the range, twin André De Toth motifs tautly braided. "Horses and information," key commodities during the Civil War, Confederate raiders seize Union herds in Colorado thanks to a mysterious traitor. The Virginian major (Gary Cooper) is court-martialed for cowardice, cf. Huston's Across the Pacific, a yellow streak painted on his back as he's drummed out of the Yankee fort. A ruse so he can infiltrate the rustlers gang run by a wily rancher (David Brian), "a neutral citizen." Rankled captain (Philip Carey) and harried colonel (Paul Kelly) have their parts to play in the game of double lives and shifting alliances, the trigger-happy foreman (Lon Chaney Jr.) eagerly waits for the hero to make a mistake. "Come on, Rebs, stir it up! This ain't no cotillion." Between High Noon and Man of the West, a consideration of the Cooper icon amid disgrace and treachery. (His scuffle with Chaney finds them exchanging blows while tumbling down a snowy slope, Cooper uses his opponent's own blade to slash his rump—a subsequent shot follows Chaney trudging beside his horse with stitched-up pantaloons.) Charles Marquis Warren screenplay, dynamic panning technique, a ring of deceit drawn so tight that joyous news delivered to the protagonist's wife (Phyllis Thaxter) swiftly crumble the operation. "It's the accidental things that sometimes change the course of history, isn't it?" The titular weapon is the experimental gun shipped out in hardtack crates and put to the test during the climactic shootout, where frigid mountains line the distant horizon and equine masses gallop diagonally across the screen. De Toth pursues the line of thought in The Two-Headed Spy and Man on a String, until reaching the apotheosis of Play Dirty. With James Millican, Guinn "Big Boy" Williams, Alan Hale Jr., Martin Milner, Wilton Graff, and Fess Parker.
--- Fernando F. Croce |